Bhutto: The Film was one of sixteen documentaries selected for judging at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Entertaining, compelling and heartbreaking, Bhutto did not "win"
at Sundance, but in this case winning is certainly not everything. As
the visually dazzling opening flashback sequence ends with a bomb blast
announcing the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007, the
image slowly fades over Pakistan's green flag with its crescent moon
and five-point star. A history lesson begins to take hold, but never
overwhelms. If the goal of a good documentary is to tell the story and
motivate thought, questions, and discussion, then the makers of Bhutto
should rest easy. In this case, history and its retelling has a soul,
and the soul of Benazir Bhutto inhabits this film.

A friend sent me the trailer and it was so beautifully done that I
requested the screener. I was not in attendance at Sundance, but my
perspective is more that of a journalist who works in the third world
and has an interest in history and the truthful telling of events that
provide the outline. If memory provides the framework of existence,
then Benazir Bhutto is positively reborn in the narrative presented by
the production team of Duane Baughman. This documentary is vexing,
dramatic, and fascinating; certainly possessing a life beyond the
glitter and cache' of Sundance if film buyers have any marketing sense
at all

Bhutto: The Film presents the story of a woman whose strength
of personality and conviction totally dominates the constraints of a
fundamentalist religious society where women had no intrinsic value.
The voice over of Bhutto describing her birth is the ghost in the room.
Her extended family was in mourning that Benazir entered the world in a
society where the only desire is that the firstborn be a boy. "Dogs and
cats were giving birth to boys," she narrates from the grave.

Never has a description of the confines of the burqa been so
eloquent as Bhutto's words take us inside the weight, isolation and
constriction of the garment. She credits her father, Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto, with giving her an "appreciation that a woman was not a lesser
creature." Bhutto says, "You can see the world through that garment,
and it is not a clear world. It is a muted, grayish world."

Beyond the confines of the burqa, Bhutto endured imprisonment,
months of solitary confinement, the state-sponsored hanging of her
father, the murder of two brothers, political exile and accusations of
corruption that resulted in eleven years of imprisonment for her
husband, who was never convicted of any crime.

Benazir Bhutto's life intersected the Muslim world in a country
mandated in confusion and political expediency that separated Muslim
from Hindu in 1947 India. The narrative account offered by screenwriter
Johnny O'Hara is a striking description of a personality that
transcended the limits of birthright--possessing all of the elements of
tragedy--but no god arrives from the machine to set things right and
redeem destiny from history's dustbin. There is supreme irony in
Bhutto's narrative about her fate as she matter-of-factly says, "My
protection comes from God, and God willing, all will go well" as she
returns from eight years of exile to begin her third and final quest
for Prime Minister. Whether she was silenced by an assassin's bullet or
the concussion of a suicide bomb really does not matter in the end, and
this documentary does not attempt to answer the as yet unanswerable. To
do so would be folly.

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Image: Screen shot of Benazir Bhutto assassination aftermath

Bhutto:The Film casts worthy doubt on the 1998
international public relations and "intelligence" campaign to discredit
the Bhutto family--a campaign that found a home in the pages of the New York Times. When John Burns, the paper's London Bureau Chief, is interviewed about the 8,000-word expose
that charged Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, with corruption,
one senses some backpedaling. Burns says, "We (journalists) are an
imperfect business."

Yes, writers are an imperfect lot, but we cannot be held hostage to
our own imperfections. The United States had huge interests in the
outcome of Russia's war in Afghanistan and before Bhutto's father was
hanged, murdered, or "judicially assassinated" by the Pakistani
government (pick one) on April 4, 1979, Henry Kissinger warned him, "We
will make a horrible example out of you." The filmmakers took a bold
step by not shying away from the elephant in the room and presented
this complex question of multi-national interests front and center.

In the end, it was Benazir Bhutto who warned the world that Pakistan
was under "increasing threat of extremism" from Al Qaeda and the
Taliban. The lessons of history are cruel and unheeded.

Was "power the end goal" as Bhutto's niece Fatima Bhutto suggests?
And if it was, was that a flaw or the means to a noble vision of
democracy for Pakistan? By all accounts, Bhutto was a both a martyr in
the end and a woman with political position during two terms as Prime
Minister, but she never had real political power, as her father did.
Her power and her strength flowed from the good will freely offered by
the Pakistani people. All of the questions remain, even in this
unabashedly sympathetic portrait.

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Is this film the absolute truth? Benazir Bhutto is the only one who
can answer the unanswerable. Feminist, or not, Bhutto's life was filled
with contradictions and that is what makes this presentation so
compelling. It is a triumph of skilled editing that a spider's web of
historical facts are interwoven with archival footage, news reports,
interviews with contemporaries, both friend and foe--the whole package
morphing quickly into live action and cutaway shots that are
cinematographically beautiful and breathtaking in composition. Bhutto
is a feast for the heart, mind and soul, delivering an education and
history lesson in its 115 minute run time.

The flaws are few, but jar at the beginning. Cheesy maps with fake
tanks are probably unnecessary as was the overly obvious sixties
background music that smacks the viewer in the face with its "power to
the people" message. I could have done entirely without Cat Stevens,
but I could not make this very good documentary either.

A short interview with Arianna Huffington that made the final cut is
useful. Huffington was at Cambridge, and Bhutto at Oxford, when they
became acquainted in the early 70's. Huffington describes Bhutto as
more than an intellect or political personality--"She was a force of
life."

Georgianne Nienaber is an investigative environmental and political writer. She lives in rural northern Minnesota, New Orleans and South Florida. Her articles have appeared in The Society of Professional Journalists' Online Quill (more...)